Eligible schools for the dinner program must have at least 50 percent of students qualify as low-income. In Madison last year, 18 elementary schools, seven middle schools and East and La Follette High schools met that requirement.

To be eligible, students must take part in an academically focused after-school program, not an after-school sport. Memorial is looking into setting up a homework club for athletes between practice and the free meal so that they can participate in the free meal.

So, in this affluent city, we are nevertheless so poor, that the federal government is subsidizing free dinner at 18 elementary schools, 7 middle schools, and 2 of the 4 high schools. And it doesn't matter how much money your parents make, you get free dinner if you go to that school and do an after school activity... as long as your activity is not sports.

Yeah, that makes so much sense. What's with discriminating against the students who, after sitting at desks all day, choose a physically active after-school activity? Aren't they more in need of food? What's the connection between this policy and fighting obesity?

"This progressive city is way behind other cities in that regard," [Mayor Paul] Soglin said. "We should not look at this as a frill, or as an experiment, but something citywide."

This is not a frill. It's an imperative... within the progressive agenda... which seems to have to do with increasing dependency of government and inspiring the young to look to the authorities as their nurturing, nourishing mothers.

for every free meal that a kid gets from school, subtract a proportionate amount from the food stamps.

if a parent is so incapable of parenting that they can't feed their kids at all -- not breakfast, not lunch (what's wrong with a PB & J?), not dinner -- let's assume they can't provide for any of their basic needs, and set up "public boarding schools" (but, again, no more welfare benefits for the kiddies).

What's next: subsidized clothing distribution?

Of course, the biggest issue is that plenty often, this is a money-maker for the schools, when the subsidies from the feds are substantial enough that they cover the full cost, and some.

If parents are the most important indicator of success for students, why would progressives want to take away one of the best forms of education available in the home - preparing food, eating food, and sharing about your day over food?

I'll have to ask Mom and Dad what they would think if I skipped the family meal for homework and hamburgers at school.

My wife is a lunch lady at the local high school. The percentage of kids getting free lunch is far higher there than the national average, reported to be 40% of all school children. These kids have fashionable clothes and the latest smart phones. Some have their own cars. Eligibility is based on the level of income the parents claim to have. Virtually no verification is made of these claims of income, only a few spot checks during the school year. If a fraudulent claim is discovered, there is no penalty other than withdrawal from the program. No one would argue against a program for kids who are truly in need. Clearly this is not how the federal program is run.

Now, on top of this criminal mismanagement of federal funds comes a raft of draconian federal regulations concerning what the school may and may not serve. Basically, the rules are, if it tastes good it is banned or severely restricted.

These are the implicit messages here-- you are incapable of deciding what your kids eat, and you will be beholding to the government for feeding them, so keep voting for more goodies. This is the definition of a moral hazard.

The obesity epidemic started about the time the government decided it had to feed our children instead of kids either going home for lunch to bringing their lunch to school. Then the government started feeding our children breakfast. Now dinner. Coincidence?

In the summer, my son got free breakfast four days a week for a month because he was participating in the summer band program and went to the middle school every Monday thru Thursday morning in the month of June. There was no qualification for the free breakfast. Parents could get breakfast too, at a cost of about $2. Kids in summer school (which lasted about 6 weeks) were offered breakfast and lunch free. And I think the program continued through the rest of the summer too. All you had to do was show up.

That's odd. When I was bussed to an inner city nearly all black school (having only 2 whites in a class of thirty, and 4 whites in a school of hundreds), I always felt disadvantaged (first because I was small and not black) but also because I couldn't get the hot lunches.

As I was reading this I recall a good feeling about my sixth grade teacher, that she allowed me to sign up for the hot lunches (even encouraged me to). She was black. Hah, I remember telling the class "Don't let anyone push you around. You have nails, you can scratch. You have teeth, you can bite."

Sister teaches at a (formerly) failing public school that has been revamped by fresh ideas and new approaches. Kids must wear a uniform of color coded polo shirts and belted pants. Shirts are offered for $4 at the start of the school year. Sounds subsidized.

They feed kids breakfast and lunch. Except for athletic programs, kids must be gone by 5. The schoool has after hour classes for kids that have been kicked out of regular classes but who still must be educated - with an armed security officer in each room.

Local churches take turns feeding the football players Friday nights before the games.

It is becoming the norm that parents expect and eventually rely on schools to nourish their kids and provide some sort of cheap / free after school care. What is left for parents to do? Get em put to bed and start over in the morning. The long term effect is dependency on others and a weaker family.

Your kids can get a cheaper and more balanced meal at home, it just takes a minimum effort and some planning ahead. I understand their are those that truly can't do this but many of the "poor" people whose kids go to my neighborhood school have nicer cars, nicer cell phones and more expensive clothes than people who are not "poor". Fact.

CATO published a study a few months ago about anti-poverty programs. There are now 126 federal anti-poverty programs in existence. We've spent over $12 trillion at the federal level, and another $3 trillion at the individual state level, on anti-poverty programs just since LBJ's Great Society. That $15 trillion has reduced the poverty rate from 19% to 15%.

And now we're fighting an obesity epidemic with a record number of people on food stamps. How can that make sense to anyone? Anybody who demands a more results oriented approach is demagogued as not sufficiently compassionate. Which just goes to show how we've been conditioned to expect our government to play a paternalistic role in providing for us. We are destroying ourselves from within by substituting government dependency for individual initiative in all aspects of our lives. It is maddening.

The opening two paragraph executive summary can be scanned quickly if you don't have the time or inclination to read the entire study:

When my brother was unemployed his kids became eligible for free school lunches. When he got a job he informed the school that his situation had changed and that was no longer needed. They said it was too much trouble to remove his kids from the program (i.e. paperwork) so that he should just leave them on the program until the end of the school year.

Ann, kids getting free lunch aren't stigmatized at lunch anymore, at least not in my kids' school. Nobody pays cash in the lunch line anymore. Each child has an account, and money is added in by the parents, the state, or both. The little kids don't have any idea about who fills their own accounts, let alone anyone else's, and the older kids probably keep it to themselves. The kids in elementary school just say their first and last name (in my kids small school) and the lunch lady finds the proper account in the computer and deducts for what the child has gotten (standard lunch is one price and they have extras like cookies and juice that cost more) and the middle and high schoolers memorize account numbers. Other schools use a card system, where all the cards are identical. I suppose a kid who is getting free lunch can't get the extra cookies in schools that offer them, but neither can lots of kids whose parents just don't put extra money in the account. And in any event, I'm sure that our cookie ration will soon be increased from five per week to zero, in the interest of preventing child obesity.

I don't know if this is a standard elsewhere, but where my wife works each kid has a number. The food service worker enters it into the cash register and the meal is paid for. Kids often give their number to friends resulting in further fraud.

Is it obvious who's paying for their own food and who isn't? Here every kid gets a code they punch in as they check out and it is either part of the free or reduced lunch or it comes out of the account parents have set up for kids.

Some local citizen provides free breakfast for all the kids at this particular school.

@ the professor, yes, it's all computerized now. Each kid who buys or "buys" lunch simply tells her name to the lunch lady who keys it into the computer. Some schools have swipe cards. Those of us who provide for our own children occasionally send in a check to replenish the account, but other than that there's no difference.

My kids' school--and this is in Texas, hardly some progressive utopia, which tells me it's pretty much universal now--provides breakfast to every child for free and with no regard to income. It is a continual annoyance to me that I get up early to make my kids eggs, oatmeal, whole wheat ricotta pancakes, whatever, so they have a rounded and nourishing start to the day which is MY RESPONSIBILITY, and I have to remind them daily not to eat the sugar bomb muffin or sausage wrapped in a pancake that someone plops onto their desk when they get to school.

I realize that there are plenty of parents who can't be bothered to use the food stamps or WIC that the rest of us give them to obtain food and then prepare it for their children in the morning, thus impacting those children's ability to perform in school and thus impacting the test scores of that particular school and district. At some point, though, can't we just say, "F-it and f-you and frankly sorry but f- your kids if you can't do the most basic parts of your job as a parent?" How far is the hand-holding going to go?

Also, in the summer, our district provides free breakfast and lunch to every enrolled student, no questions asked, and also for their parents at like $2 a head. As others have said--WTF are the "needy" using their food stamps for?!

Also, while I'm on my soapbox, I am sick to death of having our middle class income barely cover the basics and having no money for any extras while there are plenty of people of my acquaintance who live rent-free with relatives or courtesy of Section 8 and receive food stamps, Medicaid, SCHIP medical coverage, subsidized daycare, etc etc and seem to have plenty of money to blow. My health insurance premiums are $600 a month, plus copays and deductables, and we can only afford to go to the doctor when it's really needed, and then there's my friends who have new cars, shiny new iPads, send their kids to private school, and are constantly in and out of the doctor's office for acne medication and so on and on and on because they have so much disposable income because someone else is picking up the tab for the big stuff. I ran into someone at the grocery store and she was making fun of my cart full of lunch-making stuff for my four kids asking why I bother making them lunch when I can get it for free from school. Which I could if I would lie about our income, or have low income but low financial responsibilities, like so many do.

I was listening to Thomas Sowell speak the other day. I was interested to learn that he began his career as a far leftist - self-described 'marxist'. I had no idea.

When asked what changed his mind, he said it was working for government in the Labor Department. He was shocked to discover that the people there didn't really care about how their programs actually affected people - the true consequences. They didn't really care about what worked and what ending up huring real people in the long run.

Perverse incentive: there is student loan forgiveness for teachers who teach in high poverty schools. Often defined as free lunch program. There is an incentive to get a lot of kids on the program, so the teachers can shirk up to $17,500 of their student loans.

@kentuckyliz, sure there are other benefits. If someone holds up your students' test scores and asks why your teaching hasn't improved them, you can blame poverty---"My students aren't able to concentrate because poverty!". If someone then says you maybe you'll have to do without a pay raise this year you can say "My job is harder than yours because poverty!". The poorer your students are, the harder you job is, and the harder your job is, the more courageous you are for attempting it, and the easier it is to say that those who criticize you are just hateful.

Progressive corruption. They are marginalizing the relationship between parents and their children, and sabotaging the first level of social organization (i.e. family), including relieving the parents of responsibility for the welfare of their children.

Along with shifting responsibility and accountability, there is a majority of the population reproducing in the minority. Women, and men, just want to have fund, and are electing to exchange their liberty for submission with benefits. As they embrace behaviors which constitute evolutionary dysfunction, they are also voluntarily committing generational suicide.

Perhaps these reformers are still concerned with overpopulation. However, if that was true, then they would be more concerned with unmeasured immigration.

No. They have ulterior motives, including sabotaging character development and destroying the first level of social organization, which would break the traditional and natural bonds of cooperation that follow from familial relationships.

@LilyBartWhat do these geniuses think will happen to our country and to society when the money runs dry?

Some say we will become like Greece. Except we won't become like Greece because we don't have Germany to bail us out. On the other hand, looking at Greece is constructive. It changed me from thinking another four years of Obama might wake the country up, and have a sea change, to realizing how far down the road you can go and keep it together.

I suspect what will happen is that so many people will be dependent on the government, the thing "We all belong to," government, will get ever bigger.

Perhaps we will follow Russia into communism, and invent a new currency (in Russia it was Vodka). Maybe here it will be hamburgers, as Michelle will only allow us to eat celery sticks.

I don't know how payments are done at school these days, but you could have cards that students with money pay for and other students get free.

That's the way it's done here. Our district is majority free/reduced price lunches. Regular lunch, full price is $2.20, reduced price is 40¢, and free is free of course.

Each child has a school ID. Lunch money is "on" the card. The card is scanned at lunch and the appropriate amount is deducted. There are no cash transactions. Children are free to bring their own lunches to school.

In the elementary schools, teachers keep the IDs with their classes. In middle school and above each child wears his or her ID on a lanyard all day.

Our district uses a website called mypaymentsplus.com. Parents can make payments there or send money in to the school.

The IDs are necessary for the free and reduced lunches as well because they track the number of meals.

Where I taught last year in rural Virginia, students could not tell who got free lunches and who didn't. They gave their 5-digit numbers (the same ones they used to log on to the school computers) to the lunch lady and the meal was automatically charged either to the account their parents had paid for or to the subsidized-food-for-poor-kids account. They could NOT use their numbers to buy other kids food, because their pictures were displayed on the cash register when they typed in their numbers. The picture stayed up until the next kid came through, so you could walk through the cafeteria half an hour after lunch and see who was the last kid through each line, since his/her picture (and name) were still displayed. Nobody but teachers and the occasional outside visitor paid cash.

Question: With free breakfast, lunch, and apparently, now dinner as well, for "kids"....what will these "kids" do when they leave school? Who will feed them? Cloth them? Does the dependency process ever end?

Another question: Apparently well enough off parents can pre-fund their kids account for meals by writing a check. Do these parents have the ID required by all banks for transactions? Is this ID required to vote in their precincts? If not, why not?

Interesting article not long ago floating around somewhere, with the quite sensible comment that poverty rates don't measure degree of material deprivation but just the inability of families to support themselves. And tacking on welfare benefit after welfare benefit won't increase self-sufficiency.

I once tried to track down the formulas or methods used by the government to set food stamp levels, with no success. I would have expected it to be based on a hypothetical meal plan and average prices, but I couldn't actually figure it out. Food stamp amounts do seem extremely generous when I compare them to what I spend and I'm not sure if they figure everyone buys brand name, steak, and fresh produce in- and out-of-season, at the priciest store rather than at Aldi, or what's going on.

I'd much rather pay taxes to feed kids (whether rich or poor) 3 meals a day at school rather than have the same money pissed away in the usual current popular governmental fashion (endless obscure development studies, "management conferences," land use "visioning", etc.) While the expenditures for "healthy food" may be wasteful or over-inclusive, at least some kid will get to eat.

Bizztt, dit dit, splitzz, dot dit..."recalculating" ... rescind that last idea, you'd no doubt get a gummint administrator assigned specifically to you and your house, costing $76,000 per year, for which you would be penalized, uh, uhm, er..."taxed" to support.

Oh and talk about learning to be a meek subject of the all powerful state:

Any kid can be random drug tested at any time.

And this is the lesson of every government handout, a lesson that unfortunately is completely lost on liberals. Every time the government gives you something with the right hand, it takes away something with the left. Every trivial government program does this, but with Obamacare we surrender every last vestige of personal sovereignty. A conservative of all people was making the argument on Fox News today that government restrictions on food products were a good thing, because obesity drives up the cost of medical care for all of us. This can only happen when the government forces you to pay for the bad decisions made by other people. When the public must pay for all health care, any human behavior can be, and will be, restricted on the grounds that it "drives up the cost of medical care for all of us." Do you like hang gliding? Uh-uh, too dangerous. I'm not going to pay for your fractured spine. The same goes for surfing, hunting, bicycling, waterskiing, you name it. Do you get it yet, liberals? When you fall into the safety net, it traps you.

I use to substitute in a much less affluent city. It was a military town in fact. Out of 12 elementary schools, 5 middle schools and 4 high schools, none of them had free dinner programs.

Only two of the elementary schools had a free breakfast program. These were extremely low income schools. The kids ate breakfast in the classroom, the teacher had to pick it up, serve it and clean up. Even if a student was late, up until 1030, they had to be offered breakfast. My guess is maybe 2 kids in each class seemed really hungry for the breakfast.

I don't mind the lunches or the dinners. Feed all the kids as far as I am concerned and take it out of the school budget. But require that the local governments pay for it. That way people can decide if it's really a priority. Will they pay for it iout of local tax money?

Thirty five cents of every dollar the federal government is spending is now borrowed. The lunch is not free. It's going to be paid for in the future by the kids who are eating the meals now. Those who get educated well enough to,hold jobs, that is.

By the way what is the educational outcome of the kids in this school?

They won't let the locals feed the kids--the feds want the power. Our queen just told the Dr. Oz show that she got Congress to appropriate even more money for school lunches/dinners/breakfasts because it hadn't been raised is soooo many years.

However, OHSA requires we confiscate your knives and forks because sharp or pointy objects are too dangerous for your use unsupervised. Now, if you have the audacity to ask us to use soap, well, there's this EPA penalty...er, uhm, "tax" you will need to pay to the IRS.

Yes, that's it. I had never known about Section 8 housing (subsidized housing) until a project on my then-job put me in contact with the system for a few months. I still don't fully understand the amount that Section 8 pays, but I was surprised to learn that it didn't cover the total rent. (Don't have time to google it right now, sorry.)

From what I observed, the landlords were the ones milking the system, not the tenants. Let's say a going private market rate for a crap apartment in a not-great neighborhood was $600 a month. The subsidized housing voucher would discount it a percentage, but the Section 8 landlord would inflate the price to $1500 for the equivalent of the $600 apartment. That way he cleaned up on a huge subsidy of the inflated price, while the tenant only got a real world break of a much smaller portion against market rates.

Meanwhile, the people living there were artificially limited to about 2 residents plus 2 kids. But the only way they could save any real money was to pretty much "illegally" move their boyfriend, extra kids, or anyone they ever met into the apartment, too, until they were all evicted - a very long process.

There were only one or two section 8 landlords in the whole area, but they owned nearly all the official section 8 apartments.

People tend to get mad at the "beneficiaries" they think should be working harder, but really it's the government-funded landlords that break the system.

We want, wish and hope our schools will provide our children an effective education that will help them become successful and engaged adults and citizens. Most public schools are primarily funded through locally-raised property taxes paid directly and indirectly by everyone living in the district. The monies are spent on physical plant capital construction and maintenance (e.g., clean, safe and comfortable building, playgrounds and ball fields;) on salaries and wages of teachers, support staff, and administrators; and on a wide number of programs and supplies for the students (e.g., books, computers, athletic and scholastic competitions and contests. Am I being jejune in thinking that free meals are hardly some baleful expenditure beyond the pale, but rather, are a reasonable and thoroughly useful addition to our children's school day? Most schools have provided a variety of meals and foods throughout the school day for some time. They have also provided access to running water at the fountain and in the washroom, heated rooms in the winter, an auditorium to hear the school band or the school's principal, and a school nurse to attend to the bumps and bruises that are often apart of most kids' school days.As an interested and concerned community, why should a meal of an apple, a ham sandwich and a glass of milk something we decry offering to all of our school kids?